Julia Kent – Character

Cellist Julia Kent describes third solo album Character in evocatively conceptual terms, its ten instrumental pieces a musical musing on life’s unpredictability, particularly the lack of control each of us have in our own futures. It’s a suitably grand theme for an album that has a pronounced transportive power, its affecting serenity capable of sparking the same kind of meditative introspection in the listener as that which reportedly drove its creation.

Using loops and beds of found sound, Kent bows palliating melodies with low key exactitude, and it’s initially a profoundly immersive listening experience. But Kent’s talents can’t keep Character’s quality up for its full duration; after a while, the textures blur and the willing sense of absorption fades into distraction, with tracks too similar in sound for all to possess their own distinct tenor. While it lasts, however, the spell cast is strongly felt, and therefore worth seeking exposure to. [Chris Buckle]